Using Enterprise Grid Computing Technologies to Manage Large-scale Geoimage and Raster Databases

One of the biggest challenges we face for large-scale geo-spatial image and raster data management and processing is the huge volume of such data. Numerous remote sensors of different types on various platforms are collecting real time data about the Earth and our environment for different purposes on a daily basis. Individual images can be very small but they can be huge in the scale of terabytes as well. A raster database can have millions of such images or raster gridded datasets. This paper discusses the major problems and challenges for archiving and managing such huge geoimage datasets, a solution using Enterprise Grid Computing technologies and its benefits. As an experiment, a series of tests, measurements and analyses using Oracle 10g Grid and GeoRaster technologies were conducted. A single image in the size of over one terabytes was created. Multi-user concurrency and performance were tested. The research shows that a large-scale enterprise database management system with raster data management capabilities enables Grid Computing for geospatial datasets and together they may provide an effective and efficient way to solve the problems for raster data archiving, management, processing and distribution. Enterprise Grid Computing technologies with a proper setup of the multi-tier architecture not only provide the benefits of lower cost, higher quality and greater flexibility, but also improve the scalability and performance of such large-scale spatial databases.